Policy —

Verizon: Comcast P2P blocking was wrong, we won’t do it

Even though a court recently eviscerated the FCC's control over network …

Verizon isn't a fan of the FCC's proposed "third way" approach to network neutrality rules, and the company's top policy people have suggested that the Internet needs an entirely new "policy framework." Such a framework will require massive wrangling in Congress, so in the short term, Verizon has partnered with Google and others to find a "consensus" framework for the short-term.

Is this a plan to avoid government rules on openness and turn the company into a maniacal bit-blocker? At a recent panel discussion (PDF), Verizon policy exec Link Hoewing said no—the company has no wish to go down Comcast's P2P blocking route, and he called out Comcast for its earlier approach.

"We came up with a standard that says any of the players on the Internet should not do anything that harms users or competition," said Hoewing. "And I think that's a pretty important policy principle. Because what it says is that, take the Comcast case, in that case, they were using reset packets and it clearly did harm a lot of users. They were not able to use the Internet, some of them. So that principle basically says you can't do that kind of thing, even if it's network management to deal with congestion problems. That's not appropriate."

"So, for example, again the Comcast case, if there would have been an industry body, and I don't just mean industry players, I mean also even advocates that have an engineering and technology background, they should be part of the process; so should folks in the academic world. But they should be able to meet regularly and look at some of these issues. So Comcast could have come in and said, 'Look, we've got a congestion problem. It's severe, it's caused, we think, by P2P. How do we deal with this? Have you guys got some ideas, because frankly, the ideas we are thinking about we are not sure are going to work that well.'"

This sounds like an excellent approach to problem-solving, though the new Broadband Internet Technical Advisory Group so far includes no public interest advocates. "Transparency" is one of Verizon's consensus framework positions, and transparency about congestion issues and other Internet problems is certainly beneficial, so long as some agency like the FCC can serve as a backstop to set at least a few minimum ground rules.

Comcast could have learned the "transparency" lesson a bit earlier. The FCC noted that Comcast repeatedly "changed its story" when investigated, eventually admitting that its "current P2P management is triggered... regardless of the level of overall network congestion... and regardless of the time of day."